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European Consortium for Humanities Institutes and Centres
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ECHIC conference 2012
The third ECHIC conference will be held in the new Centre for Advanced Studies, Highfield House, on University Park, Nottingham from March 24th to 26th, 2013.
Beyond the monograph: Academic publishing in the 21st century
The dominance of the scholarly monograph, subscription-based journal and the Big Book thesis is now under duress from a combination of: the growing acceptability of open access publishing; increased interest in the use of web 2.0; multimodal exhibitions and curated events; and exploration of the potential of digitized databases, visualization tools, mapping techniques, text mining and network analysis. Our conference will examine the future of scholarly publication in this emerging context. Those participating will include publishers and leading researchers working and theorising in these new spaces. All E CHIC and CIAS members are invited to attend and to present the work that their centre supports.We invite exhibition entries and potential panel speakers to contact the CAS Director, Professor Pat Thomson (patricia.thomson@nottingham.ac.uk) as soon as possible so that we can consolidate the programme. We expect to have further information to you before Christmas.
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Consultation about SSH in Horizon 2020
Thanks to the Lithuanian research council, the first Presidential conference to focus specially on the SSH will be held in September 2013. To prepare the conference a programme committee, chaired by Helga Nowotny, met early October and agreed on the need to consult widely in a bottom-up manner with the SSH community on Horizon 2020. ECHIC chairman Professor Poul Holm is a member of the comittee.The consultation process will run in two parallel strands, one directed by the programme committee, one directed by EASSH, the European Alliance for the Social Sciences and Humanities, of which ECHIC is a constituent member.The consultation will be in the form of a questionnaire. One will sent by the programme committee to all ERC grantees - including their staff – to be advised of their wishes and visions for SSH in Horizon 2020. Simultaneously, EASSH will circulate the questionnaire to try to reach a broader selection of senior and junior SSH researchers through its member organisations. EASSH was hugely successful in reaching out to more than 25,000 SSH academics in the autumn of 2011 when it sought backing for a thematic priority in Horizon 2020.
It is hoped that a wide group of academics will take up this challenge to inform the policy process even further.The questionnaire will broadly concern the themes of the landscape and institutions of SSH, research training and education, impact and evaluation. The questionnaire will concern the full scope of Horizon 2020, in particular ERC and Grand Challenges.The programme committee employs a postdoc who will summarise the feedback and provide that as a backdrop to a draft conference declaration which will be circulated for comments by summer 2013.
The ECHIC conference in March 2012 will dedicate one session to discuss the consultation process.
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Severe cuts on EU research budget
The discussions at the next summit of the European Union heads of state or government, which is scheduled for 22 and 23 November, will be decisive in determining the EU research budget for the next seven years. Several Member States are demanding severe cuts on the total EU budget and research will have to compete with other policy priorities.This is a time when we, the scientific community, should act together and make our case to protect research funding, including that of the European Research Council (ERC), from cuts. Decisions will be prepared in discussions among politicians at the national level. All of us must look for opportunities to affect these decisions and send a strong signal to the heads of state or government.
An open letter signed by European Nobel laureates has been published in top European newspapers this week. The impact of this letter will be increased if it is followed by a mobilization of the national scientific communities. To keep the momentum going, an online petition has been launched: http://www.no-cuts-on-research.euI would like to ask you to sign it and to encourage all your colleagues to do likewise. Note that in the past, less than 30 000 scientists signed the largest petition for a European scientific cause compared to the hundreds of thousands of signatures on petitions from other groups of society. We must do better than that.This action is coordinated by the Initiative for Science in Europe (ise@i-se.org; www.initiative-science-europe.org), of which EMBO is a member.
Please contact Wolfgang Eppenschwandtner, Executive Coordinator of the ISE if you have any questions or suggestions.
Best regards,Maria Leptin
Director EMBO - excellence in life sciences
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Announcement: EvalHum Forum
In the developing of the European Research Area, particularly in a time of severe budget restrictions and at the dawn of the Horizons 2020 programme, it is vital that the Social Sciences and Humanities are not forgotten. Questions related to the internationalising of humanities research will be discussed at a forum organised by researchers from the EvalHum Initiative of the Maison des Sciences de l’Homme en Bretagne and hosted by the British Academy. This international forum brings together representatives of universities, research institutions, research managers, evaluation and ranking agencies, funders and actors from the disciplines themselves to discuss the key issues affecting humanities research within the context of the European Research Area. It will look at how funding, evaluation and cooperation patterns affect the place of humanities and social sciences research in the coming years, and especially in the light of Horizons 2020.More information, including the programme and inscription form, can be found on the EvalHum website. As well as via the programme attached below.
>>>SSH Forum
>>>Programme
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November 2012
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This Newsletter is published by the European Consortium for Humanities Institutes and Centres.
For more information please visit our website echic.org
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Contact ECHIC
Rosi Braidotti, Utrecht
Centre for the Humanities
Achter de Dom 20
3512 HJ Utrecht
The Netherlands
 info@echic.org
 +31(0)30 253 6137
www.uu.nl/cfh
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